


light & power

by bioluminesce



Category: Alan Wake (Video Game), Control (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26028031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: “Cynthia Weaver,” says Jesse. “I’d like to offer you a job.”
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38





	light & power

There’s little left to steal, but Cynthia Weaver checks the locks anyway.

The routine is solemn and sustaining. It pulls her out of bed in the morning, where she lay the night before and ran the numbers. This many light bulbs. This much food. This much paint. This much money in the bank account her parents padded before they died, some remnant of the Weaver riches outliving the manor they failed to build. Keep the numbers going, even as it all crumbles and ages like she does. Some days, she wonders why she keeps the lights on now that the writer (the _other_ writer) has taken the weapon. Every day, the people in the diner look more and more like children.

Ten years go by.

A stranger appears with a key in her hand.

“Hello?”

The voice of a young woman echoes strangely off the concrete walls, the metal staircases, the long tunnels to and through the dam.

* * *

Jesse Faden turns a corner and spots the old woman with a shotgun. She doesn’t twitch toward the service weapon. That would be escalation, and that isn’t a good foot to start off on as director. She thinks about it. But even if she is in a part of the House she has never been in before, hung with bare light bulbs every few feet, she is in control. The air is hot and hums with the density of the lights.

The new motel key rattles as she puts it in her pocket. At the end of the string hangs the wire outline of a light bulb.

“Hello?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“My name is Jesse Faden. I think … I’m supposed to be here.”

The old woman shuffles forward in silhouette. “Oh. Oh, it’s been a time. A time and a time. But I think I still know how to suss out a plot. ‘Supposed to be here.’ That’s usually what the light folk say.”

As the mouth of the gun lowers, Jesse sees the deep lines on the face of the old woman.

Cynthia Weaver explains who she is. She doesn’t know about the Federal Bureau of Control, not by that name. But, she says, she watches TV. She gets the type. And when Jesse shows her the key, she shakes her head.

“No locks left unturned, here. I had something, once. This whole place a bunker for a weapon against the dark. But now it’s gone. Used.”

“Where are we?” says Jesse Faden.

“I’ll show you.”

Jesse follows her to the top floor, and—

Impossibly—

Out.

Cold, humid air buffets her and fills her with the smells of pine and petrichor and water. To smell so many living things so suddenly is a green shock. The dam stretches out not far away, white water pouring down against gray concrete and roaring. She can see the empty parking lot of the power station, the grass growing in the cracks in the asphalt and around unused machinery, the yellow floodlights at every jagged corner. The night sky spreads black wings either side of the faint line of the milky way, tipped by the pine-covered mountains. The sound of the wind is a low rustle.

This isn’t the House.

There are places that aren’t the House.

“Oh,” says Jesse Faden.

“Recognize it?” A laugh bubbles in Cynthia Weaver’s voice.

“No! I _love_ that I don’t recognize it!” Jesse grips the railing and bounces on her heels. Relief fills her. With some responsibility dropping away, she glimpses the person she might have been if her brother hadn’t disappeared. “Hello!” She calls out into the night.

“Nobody calls back,” says Weaver.

Jesse turns to her, surprised by the sincere melancholy in her voice. The old woman has left the shotgun several floors down, but has the shells in her pocket. By her side she holds a bulky lantern.

She meets Jesse’s eyes with oracle poise. “This is Bright Falls Light & Power. Decades I’ve been here, waiting to do my task. Give the clicker to Alan Wake.”

“Alan Wake? The famous writer?”

“The lightbringer. I gave it to him.”

“Maybe there’s something the Board wants you to give me.”

“I only ever served one supernatural provider, girl. And regretted that one once for every night I wanted to kiss him.

"I write too, you know. News. I was never very good at fiction, but I amuse myself now and then. I think about going back to news, but it’s a young woman’s job. The long nights, the people. You have to live for it. And I live for …” Cynthia gestures at the floodlights below, their diminishing cones. “This.”

Jesse tries to keep up. “But you said you already passed the thing on. The weapon?”

“It was a weapon, yes. Against a foe that doesn’t bother to attack me any more.” Abruptly, Weaver flings the lantern out toward the railing without letting it go. “Dark Presence, bah. That’s all done. The crowd has gone home, the ring is being folded up, the writers are working on next season. Without me. I’m ready if it comes, but I don’t want it to. Won’t find me asking for adventure. That sounds exhausting. Except sometimes, it sounds like a love story I missed having. Whether or not any writer is in it.”

_Maybe the motel key didn’t appear because it was pointing me toward an Object of Power. Maybe it was pointing me toward her. She knows how to take care of things. This clicker, that sounds like an Object of Power, maybe. And she’s dedicated. And alone. I can’t just leave her here if she wants to go._

“This clicker … you contained it? Monitored it?” Jesse asks. 

Cynthia turns from looking out at the darkness and faces Jesse instead, the lantern still in her hands. “I checked hundreds of lights, every day, to make sure it stayed where it was. Until the one other person in the world … in our world … who knew it existed came for it.”

_Hundreds of lights? Just like the Panopticon ..._

“Cynthia Weaver,” says Jesse. “I’d like to offer you a job.”

* * *

The floodlight comes on with a thud that shakes the walls.

Frederick Langston and Cynthia Weaver look up as the director floats from the pit of the Panopticon into the hall. Langston had been showing her the containment protocols for a fencing helmet.

Cynthia has now known Jesse Faden long enough that the director no longer looks like a child. Weaver has accepted the one-way trip to the Oldest House, knowing it may be a dead end for her more than for most. She is not, as they say, getting younger. This has not stopped her. The Oldest House offers all the satisfaction of being a fighter for the light that Thomas Zane ever could, and whatever else he could offer her is now worlds and shores away. She has started writing fiction. She has started cataloguing Objects of Power, and she is good at it. Some of the Rangers get confused by her tendency to speak in vague warnings, but she is not, by far, the strangest thing in the Oldest House, and surrounded by people who mask their own uncertainty with protocols for absolutely everything.

Faden is on her way somewhere. She’s wearing a dive suit — the other kind, the black rock-reinforced armor of an astralnaut. The scarlet core rope memory threads through her hair. “Everything okay, Langston? Cynthia?”

“As good as can be expected, director,” says Langston.

Cynthia now keeps a long flashlight in her utility belt, whether she is focused on her work or on one of her long rests. She salutes Faden with it. “You be careful of the dark, director.”

Faden will.

Cynthia is learning. Faden was honest with her about what working for the FBC meant: being trapped by the Hiss in an organization that has done terrible things, under a director who has little idea and great will on how not to do them again. A new job does not provide any closure for what Cynthia did in her easy willingness to go along with Zane’s perhaps manipulative provocation. She misses the air of Bright Falls, and understands why Jesse drank it in like she had been drowning. But the House has its own magic. And the House is well lit.

Cynthia Weaver was a newspaper editor, which means she finds things and separates the wheat from the chaff as best she can. And she was a keeper of a powerful thing, which means she knows the monotony of containment. Combine the two, and you get a person who is not afraid of looking eccentric who will dig to the bottom of things, as long as she needs something to do.

There’s a lot to do in the Panopticon.

She thinks less and less of Thomas Zane, more and more of romance novels and one of the Rangers, the one with gray in his hair.

She does not know what power makes the lights hum in the House, but she idly plans to find out.


End file.
